Friday, May 9, 2014

The Coming Famine

Consumers live like toddlers, in a comfortable crib
surrounded by colorful toys, with others providing our needs.We can turn on our computer without blowing
apart mountains to fetch coal.We don’t
have to murder indigenous people to put gas in our Prius.We don’t have to destroy rainforests to plant
soy for our veggie burgers.Someone else
does it for us.The grocery store always
has food, so we can spend seven hours a day staring at screens.

Electricity and petroleum were experiments that have far
higher costs than benefits.Luckily,
they are finite, and humankind’s devastating addiction can only be
temporary.Food, on the other hand, is
an actual need.Those who attempt to
quit their food habit soon experience painful withdrawal symptoms and die.Experts tell us that our population will hit
nine billion by 2050, but reality isn’t required to obey trend lines.Experts predict that by 2030 there will be
five cities having populations in excess of 30 million.Imagine what a hellish life that would be.

Experts also tell us that we’re already beating the stuffing
out of the planet with a wee herd of just seven billion.We’re engaged in a mad effort to prove that
perpetual growth is possible, an endeavor slithering with slimy brain worms.It’s an embarrassing and disgraceful
enterprise for a species so proud of its legendary intelligence and
evolutionary superiority.

And yet, there is tireless jabber, by serious straight-faced
experts with nice neckties, about what needs to be done to feed nine billion, a
heroic humanist project as sensible as space colonies.Only humans matter, they believe.Humanists are not biologists.Biologists comprehend ecological
reality.They have a clear-headed understanding
of overshoot, and the dependable all-natural remedy for overshoot.What goes up must come down.

Obviously, we could reduce almost all of our serious problems
by shifting our population into reverse, and flooring the gas pedal — a rational
strategy that’s theoretically possible, but the experts are not interested, nor
is anyone else.It’s traitorous heresy.God commanded us to breed like there’s no
tomorrow, so we must.Big Mama Nature
laughs out loud at our folly, and with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, fetches
her medicine bag.

Julian Cribb is an Australian science writer of good repute,
who suffers from having both humanist and biologist tendencies.He began to suffer from nightmares, in which
humankind’s amazing techno-magic failed to provide regular happy meals for nine
billion, resulting in human suffering.During the daylight hours, he rolled up his sleeves and did a lot of
high quality research, to envision a way to regularly provide nine billion happy
meals.Then he wrote The Coming Famine.

The path we’re on today is in the fast lane to serious famine,
which is expected to peak by 2050.It
will not be a single global catastrophe, but a series of regional famines
scattered over time and place.Rapid economic
growth in nations like India and China is accelerating the fast lane, because
one of the first desires of the newly prosperous is to have a luxurious high
protein diet.This diet requires raising
far more animals, which requires raising far more grain, which requires far
more cropland, water, oil, fertilizer, machinery, and so on.

This high protein trend implies that increasing the table
settings from seven billion to nine billion will actually require doubling global
food production.Is that possible?Maybe, says Cribb, but it won’t be easy.His book provides a valuable catalog of the
serious obstacles to success, and it optimistically points to a chance of
temporarily feeding the projected mega-crowd.Success requires massive, radical, intelligent change, on a global
scale, really soon.

Climate change alone could block success.It may make it impossible to feed anything
close to the current population, let alone nine billion, and it’s out of
control.Runoff from the Himalayan
snowpack enables the survival of 1.3 billion people, and warming temperatures
will change the flow patterns of major rivers.Many other regions, like the U.S. southwest, are also at high risk.Agricultural systems cannot tolerate unusual
patterns of precipitation and temperature, and huge populations cannot tolerate
food scarcity.

Water shortages alone could make dinner for nine billion
impossible.We’re already having serious
water issues, and growing urban populations will divert more and more water from
the fields, while contributing more and more pollutants.Aquifers are being drained right now.Rivers are being pumped dry.Hot weather is speeding the evaporation of
reservoirs.

Cropland destruction alone could spoil the big dinner party.Soils are being depleted of nutrients.They are being carried away by water and
wind.They are being rendered infertile
by salt buildup.They are being buried
by urban sprawl — most cities have been built on the finest farmland in the
world. Deserts are expanding.

Peak cheap energy alone seems certain to cancel the party.Even if population growth stopped forever
today, the end of cheap and abundant energy will radically change the crazy way
we’ve been living for the last 200 years.Imagine feeding seven billion without farm machinery, irrigation pumps,
refrigerators, and transportation systems.By 2050, when nine billion are expected for dinner, the global fuel
gauge will be quite close to empty.

All life requires nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium —
remove any one and life ends.It takes
cheap and abundant energy to manufacture, distribute, and apply
fertilizers.Phosphorus is likely to
become the first essential nutrient to reach crisis stage, since phosphate
production peaked in 1989, and what remains is of declining quality.As rising demand exceeds supply, prices will
get uppity, tempers will rise, fists will fly, and crop yields will
wheeze.Phosphorus is transferred from
the soil to the corn, from the corn to the hog, from the hog to the human, flushed
down the toilet and sent to the sea, lost forever.Nutrients flow into cities and are not
returned to the fields.Poop is precious.Remember that.

Our disastrous experiment with fossil energy enabled the mass
production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, an enormous expansion of cropland
and irrigation, and the tragic success of the Green Revolution.There were 2.5 billion people in 1950, and
more than 7 billion today.The techno-miracle
that can double food production by 2050 has yet to be imagined.Half of the fertilizer we apply never reaches
the target plants, and neither does half of the irrigation water.Half of the food we grow is never eaten.It’s really hard to reduce this costly waste.We’ve tried.

Cribb doesn’t reveal the brilliant silver bullet solution for
avoiding the coming famine, but he’s bursting with smart suggestions.It’s so hard being a smart person living in a
society that has lost its mind.It
drives him bonkers.He is focused on
better management, tighter controls, and smarter processes.Other species have managed to do quite well
without controlling their ecosystem, by simply adapting to it, and enjoying
their lives.Could there be a lesson
here?

Cribb has created an excellent book.It clobbers a generous number of dangerous
illusions and lunatic fantasies, and shines a floodlight on the monsters
beneath the bed.It’s well researched,
easy to read, and an essential contribution to the human knowledgebase.Read it to the kids at bedtime, and make it
the standard gift for weddings, birthdays, graduations, vision quests, and
consumer holidays.

Jane, in 1909, Franklin Hiram King visited China, and observed daily carvans of handcarts hauling 60 gallon containers of night soil from the city back to the farm. He described this in Farmers of Forty Centuries. My review is here. Grigg says that, if cities survive, they MUST recycle the nutrients in their soil.

Yes, it only gets scarier Richard but the same messages keep coming out- need to go veggie or at least less meat and very interesting to see recommendation for tree crops- something I'm just starting to get into.